Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Jane Lytvynenko, The Wall Street Journal 5 min Read 06 Oct 2025, 12:10 pm is a battery park in an unknown place in Ukraine. (Photo: Serhii Korovany for WSJ) Summary Top Secret sites Home rows designed to support the country’s power grid during bombing. Kyiv, Ukraine – The Ukraine’s power grid weathered three winters of Russian bombing, during which engineers resolved substations under rocket and drone burning, and spent civilians in the cold and dark when Moscow tried to end their determination. Now, in their fourth winter of war, the country’s energy providers are keeping on a network of massive, US designed batteries on top secrets to keep the lights on. On one such outside yard this fall, rows of 8 feet of high white battery blocks expressed a constant high hats. ‘The best sound in the world’ because it means they work, says Vadym Utkin, an energy storage adviser to DTEK, the largest Private Energy Provider of Ukraine, which was the head of the project. The battery parks, with a combined total capacity of 200 megawatts, can deliver about two hours of energy for about 600,000 homes, equivalent to the force of a city about the size of Washington, DC which is most important, under bombing the power cells buy engineers time to repair and prevent the service. The battery parks are designed to include and regulate holes in Ukraine’s energy supply, which provides an alternative source of power, even if the network is attacked. The $ 140 million battery program, completed in August, is of utmost importance to Ukraine, who ran to partly modernize and decentralize its electricity network to help resist the Russian steps. To prevent the batteries from making a target, Ukrainians are careful about their specific location and details of the measures to protect them from Russian attack, which includes strategically placed air defense. The six sites across Kyiv and the Dnipropetrovsk region connect with the power grid and deliver power as another source, such as a thermal power plant, are offline, which helps avoid the rolling eclipses that Ukrainians have experienced for years. “We have lost more than half of our generating capacity due to rocket destruction, Shaheds, and so on,” said Olya Buslavets, the former Energy Minister of Ukraine, citing the kind of attacking rumen favored by the Kremlin. Since the beginning of Russia’s full -scale invasion, all the Ukraine’s thermal power plants have attacked. Although some power stations are online again, others are not restored. Before the war, Ukraine acquired most of its energy from its nuclear power facilities, which Russia has since targeted. The largest Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant no longer offers the country of energy after being occupied by Moscow’s forces at the beginning of the conflict. Nuclear power now forms about half of the energy mixture of Ukraine. Russia’s campaign against the Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is designed to punish civilians by depriving them over the cold winter months of heat and electricity, in the hope that Kyiv will bend to the will of Moscow. The strategy, which Moscow Bom Stations, coal mines and gas sites have seen, has not worked so far. Last winter, energy workers largely maintained the power supply, even though missiles and drones rained on it. But since then, Russia has increased its production of attack drones, which enabled Ukraine’s air defense by sending hundreds of the unmanned air vehicles in a single attack, an approach that is likely to make this winter more dangerous for Ukraine. In the US brokerage talks earlier this year, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators discussed a ceasefire about each other’s energy infrastructure. In the next few months, the attacks on power plants have reduced, but as winter approaches, both sides increase such assaults. Ukraine took out at least 15% of Russia’s oil-ring-finishing capacity in response to the target of its energy sites, and 77,000 people were without power after an attack in the Russia’s Belgorod region last week, according to the Russian state media. “If we have no agreements, a kind of ceasefire, talk and so on, these attacks with the upcoming cold will be more targeted, more practical, and of course they will bring nothing good,” Former Energy Minister Buslavets said about strikes by Russia. To combat air strikes, Ukraine constantly demanded more air defense capabilities of its allies in the West and he especially has the Patriot, the American manufactured system that can intercept ballistic missiles. President Trump promised that the delivery of more systems and Ukraine would receive two additional systems from Germany by the end of the year, but said it needed more to fully protect its cities and infrastructure. The build -up of alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, was also a matter of defense for Ukraine. Renewable energy will not fully replace core or coal, but their presence sprays diversity into the energy mixture. They also work independently, which is an asset in a war zone, where if one wind turbine is hit, the rest can continue to turn, compared to a thermal power station that comes to a complete downtime when it is beaten. Batteries now also play their role in renewable energy, which helps regulate energy raised from all kinds of sources to make sure electricity flows, even if the sun is not shining, or as turbines stop. “There is always fluctuation, there is always wasted in the system, and someone has to clean this mess,” says Utkin, from DTEK. “These machines actually clean this mess very, very effectively.” Many of what makes batteries an attractive option for Ukraine is their modularity. Each block can be taken offline and replaced with no impact on other cells. If one of them was hit, Utkin said, it would not be the end of the world. “I would cry and just curse, but honestly, to replace one cube is not that difficult,” he said. Although the new network is the largest range of battery parks in Ukraine, this is not the first. In 2021, Utkin supervised the construction of another such a park in Enerhodar, a city in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region that occupied Russia the following year. A few hours before the Russian forces entered the region, Utkin wiped off the batteries’ software and converted it into ‘expensive bricks’ which are now essentially useless. Minimal equipment is needed to replace each cell in the new network, and everyone has fire safety functions that “become more important in the context of Ukraine,” says Julian Nebreda, CEO of Fluence, the US company that provided the batteries. Despite Russia’s bombing of the electricity network and the risk to the batteries themselves, Nebreda said his business did not hesitate to report to be part of the project, which was financed by DTEC and loans from a consortium of Ukrainian banks. “Everyone understood the importance of doing it,” he added. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Power Grid #russia Ukraine War Read Next Story
Ukraine’s new strategy to keep the lights on by a war winter
